Social media: Not all it's cracked up to be

Maybe it's sacrilegious to say so in today's plugged in world, but social media sites — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Pinterest — are simply not as effective as everyone thinks they are in driving business, at least not for the specialty flooring retailer.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way. General Motors announced it would pull all of its advertising from Facebook because it found no correlation between the online behavior of consumers on these sites and their purchasing decision. At least one recent article in a major magazine said that Facebook may not be able to keep up with the changes in the way people interact, and may end up as AOL did once there was a major shift forward in technology; in other words, yesterday's news.

There's also a piece of research commissioned by the World Floor Covering Association (WFCA) that was released not long ago that found that social media is not a significant source of either influence or communication for the flooring industry.

According to the survey, while 80 percent of consumers report participating in social media, they are unlikely to use it to find a specialty flooring retailer. The report states: "It is not currently necessary for specialty flooring retailers to be actively involved in social media, as it is not likely to be used by consumers when searching for flooring information.bCrLf

In fact, the only good thing that accrues to specialty stores for their social media participation is that consumers feel those retailers are more focused on growing their business, more up-to-date on product trends, are generally doing better and are investing more than non-users of social media.

That may have some value, but maybe not enough to justify spending a lot of time updating your Facebook status.

Specialty retailer websites, however, are a different matter. Those were found to be very important for the vast majority of consumers who research flooring online. In fact, it was the third most important source after home center and manufacturer sites.

But the fact is that consumers will search you out only when they want flooring, and when they do, you had better make sure that search engines drive them to your site or you stand to lose them. Optimum search engine results require new content and postings so it's probably better to put your time into updating your site than updating Facebook.

At the same time, advertising specials and product pricing were cited by consumers as being among the primary means of driving them to specialty retailer websites. Again, it's probably a better use of your time to spend time on your web page than on a social media site if it's customers you're looking for.